The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1: Ancient Japan
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THE PRE-JOMON PERIOD 57
Shikoku's direct land connections with Honshu permitted a natural
enrichment of fauna and, as time passed, allowed for substantially
larger catches than those of
less
fortunate places in Kyushu.
Not one but several types of evidence - stratigraphic relationships,
typological developments, and a sequence of radiocarbon dates -
suggest that northwest Kyushu was the home of Japan's earliest pot-
tery. These show that the making and use of pottery spread from
Kyushu to other parts of the country. The oldest known pots were
found in Layer III in the Fukui cave at Nagasaki, with a date con-
verted to 10,750 ± 500 B.C.; Layer II has a date of 10,450 ± 350 B.C.
The lowest ceramic layer (Layer IX) in the Kamikuroiwa rock shel-
ter at Ehime is dated to 10,215
±
600 B.C. The oldest layer in the
Iwashita cave at Nagasaki is thought to be 9250 ± 130 B.C. These
dates become more recent as we move from Kyushu to Shikoku and
Honshu. They are doubtless subject to some calibration, but by just
how much is now hard to say. Doubts about the extreme antiquity of
pottery in Japan usually have been grounded in the possibility of
contamination by volcanic action, a phenomenon certainly not lim-
ited to Japan. But the earliest dates are for charcoal samples in
pottery-bearing layers deep in caves and rock shelters where at least
later volcanic fallout should have had no noticeable effect. The one
dubious date is for a shell from the Natsushima shell mound, placed
in the Earliest Jomon period after people had begun to subsist on
lower riverine and marine foods. But even that is substantiated by
the date of
a
charcoal sample from the same site.
The location of Fukui on the northwest coast of Kyushu suggests
continental connections, but as of this writing the oldest date for
Chinese pottery is still substantially later than the earliest Jomon
pieces, and no known comparable pottery has been found in China.
10
Old pottery may eventually be uncovered on the continent. If so, it
should be in a Mesolithic context and/or be recognizably transitional.
Subearliest Jomon pottery is extremely primitive and breaks into
sherds the size of postage stamps. The restored vessels are small, round
bottomed, low fired, and dirt brown in color. At the Sempukuji cave,
not far from the Fukui cave, the excavator claims to have found even
older pottery with pellets decorating the otherwise plain surface - a
"bean pattern." The Fukui cave pottery, on the other hand, has a
10 One dubious date of 8920 ± 240
B.C.
is given for a shell associated with cord-marked pottery
at Hsien-jen-tung, Wan-nien, Kiangsi Province (China). Otherwise, dates of 5630 ± 410 and
5415 ± 410 B.C. are available for bone found with coarse red Neolithic pottery from Tseng-
p'i-yen, Kueilin, Kuangsi Province.
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58 THE EARLIEST SOCIETIES IN JAPAN
decoration that consists of linear-relief and raised parallel ridges that are
generally wider in the south and narrower in the north. It has been
found on
a
roughly south-north line from Kyushu to Yamagata Prefec-
ture.
This Fukui-type pottery is followed at many sites by nail-marked
pottery. But sites yielding both types are seldom found west of the
Kansai
area.
The people
who
made them
were
apparently leaving south-
west Japan for cooler regions.
The invention of pottery making
was
not limited to Japan. Wherever
it
was
made, it was quite likely
a
product of accident and astute observa-
tions.
Conditions in Kyushu at that time offered only marginal chances
of
survival.
The inhabitants who stayed on were driven to find alterna-
tive
sources of nourishment. Boiling otherwise indigestible
plants,
espe-
cially certain grasses and ferns, made them edible and sometimes even
palatable. Making pottery
was
probably the housewife's chore,
as all
the
raw materials - clay, water, and
firewood
- were outside her back door.
Pottery contributed greatly to the quality of
life.
It enlarged the range
of
action, freeing people from fixed water sources. Storage techniques
allowed habitation near nut-yielding forests, contributing to a more
sedentary life and to a population increase into the Middle Jomon.
Before the Jomon period came to a close, pots were used not only for
cooking and storage but were adapted also for burial, ritual, and aes-
thetic use. They reflected at
a
personal level the interests of the smallest
communities and were the first artifacts to register cultural change.
Microblades as well as pottery were used in Kyushu. These were
small flake bladelets hafted perhaps on a handle and aligned for reap-
ing grasses and ferns. Elsewhere these microliths may have been at-
tached to the end of a tapered shaft and used as projectile points but
were soon superseded by arrowheads.
Microblades are a well-known type of tool found in Sakhalin and
Siberia, west to the Yenisei valley, and represent a major cultural link
between Japan and north Asia at about the close of the Paleolithic
period, before land connections were severed by the rising sea.
THE JOMON PERIOD
The Earliest Jomon
stage
(ca. 7500-5000 B.C.)
The Kuroshio, a warm-water current sweeping up from the south, and
the Oyashio, a cooler current from the north, met along the east coast
to provide exceptionally good spawning grounds for marine fauna.
Shellfish in bays, inlets, and tidal pools were discovered to be a rich
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THE JOMON PERIOD 59
source of food, even during the winter months, and supplemented the
diminishing supply of animal life. The word
jdmon
(literally, "cord
pattern") comes from a description of pottery found in the first shell-
mound excavation of modern archaeology. The excavation was made
by an American scientist, Edward S. Morse, who came to Japan in
1877 and proceeded shortly thereafter to excavate the shell mounds of
Omori, which he had noticed when traveling by train between Yoko-
hama and Tokyo. In his book
The Shell Mounds
of
Omori
(1879) Morse
refers to the excavated pottery as "cord-marked," noting especially a
great profusion of such pottery. For a time, this was described as
"Ainu school pottery" or "shell-mound pottery," but a literal transla-
tion of Morse's original description (jdmon) gradually came to stand
for the entire period in which such pottery was produced.
Typology lagged until the 1930s but then rapidly developed after a
chronological system was set up by Yamanouchi Sugao around 1937.
11
His scheme divided the Jomon period into Earliest, Early, Middle,
Late,
and Latest, a temporal arrangement in which all types of pottery
were placed in historical order, paralleled by cognate types found
throughout the country. Moreover, Yamanouchi's stages were of about
equal length. Progressively more detailed studies of hundreds of pot-
tery types did little to change this scheme, but the advent of new dating
techniques makes it clear that although the basic sequence is tenable,
the strong regionality of culture
is
obscured if the
scheme is
left unquali-
fied. Local differences created substantial time overlaps, and each
phase became somewhat shorter with greater cultural complexity.
Use of the Jomon term begs the question of whether the period is
genuinely neolithic. The hunting of fossil creatures was basic to the
economic life of the preceramic stage, hence the term Paleolithic. The
addition of microliths and pottery to an essentially hunting economy is
regarded as characteristic of
a
Mesolithic age, but there are no signs of
plant cultivation in early Jomon. The possibility of simple manipula-
tion of cultigens in later Jomon stages is being debated. The period is
therefore protoneolithic. For want of
a
better name, Jomon is thus the
most useful.
Following the discovery of "pre-Jomon" pottery in Kyushu and
elsewhere, Yamanouchi added an earlier stage that he called Soso-ki
(the "grass-roots" stage). It has been adopted by some and rejected by
others on the ground that the pottery is not "Jomon" and that the
11 Yamanouchi Sugao, "Jomon doki keishiki no saibetsu to taibetsu,"
Senshi kokogaku 1
(1937):
29-32,
used the stages Soki, Zanki, Chuki, Koki, Bunki.
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60 THE EARLIEST SOCIETIES IN JAPAN
subsistence system of this phase was Paleolithic-style hunting. Some
Westerners use this term, which I call Subearliest in order to distin-
guish the phase from, and to show its relationship to, Earliest Jomon.
Some prefer "Incipient."
Natsushima is the site of the oldest deposit of shells left by early
people in the Kanto plain, with radiocarbon dates of 7290 ± 500 and
7500 ± 400
B.C.
Its lowest layer contained mostly oysters and
Anadara
granosa,
a warm-water mollusk.
12
Shells in that layer, which yielded
the Earliest Jomon bullet-shaped pots, included those of Yamato
shijimi
(a freshwater clam), as well as perch and gilthead bones (both
freshwater fish), suggesting habitation near the mouth of
a
reasonably
large river. Asari and
hamaguri
(clams) were commonly found on the
top layers with slightly later pottery, where gilthead was replaced by
red seabream (madai) that inhabits deeper waters. The bay was then
moving inland, forcing the Jomon people to retreat to higher ground
and inundating some earlier community
sites.
'3
By and large, the sites of
this
phase are rather few, and their cultural
content is relatively meager. Bone fishhooks, usually not barbed, were
rapidly improved along the northern coast. Arrowheads were small,
used more frequently by inland hunters. Plant bulbs and starchy roots
were dug with large, adzlike tools that were made of sandstone, slate,
or other soft stone. Nuts and possibly seeds were pulverized with
grinding stones.
Hanawadai in Ibaragi Prefecture is the first recognizable Earliest
Jomon community site.
1
'' Five house pits lying about 10 meters apart
contained two successive Hanawadai pottery subtypes, probably mean-
ing that not more than three houses were occupied at any one time.
The little bands of occupants could hardly have numbered more than
ten or fifteen. One pit is not quite square, measuring 4.6 by 3.8
meters, and has twelve holes for posts. Outdoor fireplaces were used.
Seemingly inconvenient bullet-shaped pots stood upright in the soft,
loose surface soil. Dogs were kept around the house, the
Canis
famil-
iaris japonica
(small, short-haired, Spitz-like dogs) that were perhaps
ancestors of the present-day Shiba.
Most of the few human skeletons excavated from sites of this phase
have been found intentionally buried among the shells, lying on their
12 Sugihara Sosuke and Senzawa Chosuke, Kanagawa-ken Natsushima ni
okeru
Jomon bunka
show no kaizuka (Tokyo: Meiji daigaku bungaku kenkyusho, 1957).
13 Esaka Teruya, Jomon doki to kaizuka, vol. 2 of Kodai-shi
hakkutsu
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973),
pp.
89-90.
14 Yoshida Itaru, "Ibaragi-ken Hanawadai kaizuka gaiho," Nihon kokogaku 1 (1948): 27-33.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE JOMON PERIOD 6l
backs in flexed positions. They dramatize the severe conditions faced
by the people of that day. The earliest known Jomon man was un-
covered in 1949 below a shell layer in the Hirasaka shell mound in
Yokohoma City. He stood rather tall for a Jomon person: about 163
centimeters. His lower left molars were worn down to the jawbone,
probably caused by years of pulling leather thongs across them, and
X-rays of
his
bones showed growth interruptions, interpreted as near-
fatal spells of extreme malnutrition during childhood. The joints tes-
tify to early aging. Virtually unused wisdom teeth are partial evidence
for a life expectancy of about thirty years, an estimated average
through the Middle Jomon, with an increase of only one year during
the next two millennia, until the adoption of rice as a dietary staple.
Subcultural divisions of the Earliest Jomon period are located in the
south, the Kanto, and the north. From Kyushu to the Kanto plain,
pointed-bottomed pots were decorated by rolling
a
carved stick over the
surface. In the Kanto a rudimentary form of cord marking was used.
But to the north of that plain and at about the same time, decorative
techniques were dominated by shell marking and imprinting.
The last complete listing of sites published for each prefecture by
the Cultural Properties Commission shows 2,530 for the Earliest
Jomon, or 9 percent of the Jomon aggregate. Almost half of these are
located in the lowlands of the Kanto (1,213), with Tokyo claiming the
lion's share (349). The mountainous Chubu region follows (377), then
the Tohoku in the north (249), and Kyushu in the south (243). The
entire Chugoku region has only 83, or 3.28 percent of the total. (See
Map 1.1.)
Koyama Shuzo calculated the population of the Earliest Jomon to be
around 21,900. 'J Inhabitants had moved to higher land in the valleys of
the lower-central mountains and established communities to the north-
east. Concentration in these areas throughout most of the Jomon period
can be accounted for by
a
variety and abundance of plant, mammal, and
sea life, where northern and southern environmental zones overlap in
central
Japan.
With the exception of the Latest
Jomon,
and possibly the
Middle Jomon, the Kanto sites are usually more numerous and fre-
quently larger. Over half of the Earliest Jomon population was strung
out along the banks of Kanto streams, with ready access to water sup-
plies,
for the same reason that earlier and later people - amounting to
teeming millions in modern times - congregated there. Yet until the
15 Koyama Shuzo, "Jomon Subsistence and Population," Senri Ethnological Studies, no. 2 (Mis-
cellanea no. 1) (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1978), pp. 6-7, 56.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
62 THE EARLIEST SOCIETIES IN JAPAN
K. e Y
1
KURJOHWAA
A PALEOUfH/C
2 HWAZUMI S-M
3 ANCffS • J6M0W P6R.IOP STfES
4 KA1^0Hi\f4A .s-fA
6 HANAWAt**! S-M
Map I.I Paleolithic and Jomon period sites. Notation s-m after site
name indicates shell mound.
medieval centuries it was always a rather uninventive area - with the
possible exception of the unusual sixth-century
haniwa
- where rela-
tively little initiative was demanded for survival.
The
Early Jomon
stage
(ca.
5000-3500
B.C.)
Consistent warming and a rising sea level pushed the coastal popula-
tion farther inland during the Early Jomon period, with the tempera-
ture peaking several degrees higher than today toward the end of this
stage. Water flooded low valleys, and some Kanto sites are as much as
fifty kilometers from the present shore. In the Kitakami plain of the
Tohoku region a few sites lie about thirty kilometers inland, but else-
where the steep eastern coast prevented such extreme marine aggres-
sion. Farther south, the Inland Sea joined the ocean, leaving Shikoku
and Kyushu as islands.
The shell mounds of this stage contain chiefly freshwater clams
(Yamato
shijimi or
Corbicula
japonica,
and marine
haigai
or
Anadara
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THE JOMON PERIOD 63
granosa)
and oysters (magaki or
Crossostrea
gigas).
l6
Animal bones - not
numerous - are chiefly those of
deer,
boars,
flying
squirrels, and Sibe-
rian mountain
lions.
Investigations indicate that mainly older deer were
hunted, that the fast-breeding wild boars were killed indiscriminately,
and that mountain lions were dying out. In the more isolated areas of
western Japan, animal life was reduced, leaving fewer resources for
human survival. The higher temperature encouraged the growth of the
evergreen oak forests
(Quercus)
that covered much of west Japan.
The warmer temperature was also conducive to the growth of warm-
water Anadara
granosa
as far north as the Daigi shell mound near
Matsushima Bay, although its habitat is now south of
Tokyo.
On the
other hand, the cold water mollusk
(Pecten
yesoensis),
now thriving in
northeast Honshu, could not stand the warmth and is therefore miss-
ing from the Early Jomon shell mounds of that area.
Around the middle of the Early Jomon, reliable food sources and
somewhat longer stays near the coast produced a dramatic increase in
population. According to Koyama's calculations, the Early Jomon
population numbered around 106,000, or five times that of the Earli-
est Jomon, an increase unmatched at any other stage of the Jomon
period.
Small Early Jomon villages, developed on bluffs, had pit houses
grouped in the form of a horseshoe. The presence of pottery of sev-
eral successive types at a single site indicates continuous habitation.
As this occurred, family demands fostered advances in house con-
struction. The older, poorer shelters or huts were now transformed
by the introduction of substantial inner posts strong enough to hold a
roof over a rectanguloid floor. Rainwater shed by the pitched roof was
drained off through surrounding ditches. Kay a (a miscanthus) was
probably the roofing grass, fifteen centimeters of which would have
been enough to keep the interior dry. Toward the end of the Early
Jomon, the inner space took the form of a square with rounded
corners. Some fireplaces were moved inside, though rarely were
placed in the middle of the floor. Indoor living now offered more
attractions.
Houses were occasionally extended to accommodate growing fami-
lies,
but archaeological evidence reveals few repairs and almost no
overlapped houses so often found at Middle Jomon sites. The forty-
eight houses of the Minabori shell mound, located on a rather level
16 Kaneko Hiromasa, "Gyoro no tenkai," in Esaka Teruya, ed., Jomon doki to kaizuka, vol. 2 of
Kodai-shi hakkutsu (Tokyo, Kodansha, 1973), pp. 119-24.
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64 THE EARLIEST SOCIETIES IN JAPAN
plateau in Yokohama and distributed to form a rough arc, had doors
facing an open space to the north.
17
Because successive rebuilding did
not alter this fundamental plan, it is thought that use of the common
area had become well established. An improving economy is suggested
by storage pits found both inside and outside houses. Such pits were
lined by alternating layers of leaves and nuts in order to keep most of
the pit's contents dry, allowing cupboard raids to expose only a little at
a time.
Most of the house pits of Minabori contained Kurohama-type pot-
tery belonging to the middle years of the Early Jomon. These flat-
bottomed pots were designed for cooking, and their new shapes made
them more practical for indoor living on intensely used floors that
were tamped hard. A short-lived spell of tempering the clay with small
fibers - a practice that perhaps started in the Tohoku and moved
south - may have been connected with attempts to strengthen the
walls of the pots when increasing their size and experimenting with
flat bottoms. Heavy cord marking is typical, and before the Early
Jomon phase was over, Moroiso-type pottery appeared, bearing im-
printed and incised decorative arcs and parallel lines made with the
end of
a
small split bamboo stick.
Recent excavations at the Torihama shell mound in Mikata-cho of
Fukui Prefecture point up hitherto unknown advances in the Early
Jomon.
18
One of the rather few kitchen middens found on the west
side of Japan, it lies beside the Hasu River in a laurel
(laurilignosa)
forest area dominated by oak. These excavations show that boars,
deer, monkeys, raccoon-dogs, bear, serows, otters, martens, and bad-
gers were hunted; several kinds of fish were caught; and a variety of
freshwater shellfish, saltwater mollusks, clams, oysters, and ark shells
were collected. Walnuts, hazelnuts, and acorns were also gathered.
But of special interest are the bottle gourds
{Lagenaria siceraria)
and
"green beans"
(Phaseolus
sp.) that were pea shaped and found in long
narrow pods averaging eleven centimeters in length and thirteen beans
to a pod. Many Japanese archaeologists regard both as cultivated
plants, indeed suggesting that pollen changes indicate environmental
alterations caused by clearing and that trees of foothill forests were cut
and used for building materials, wooden tools, and firewood.'»
17 Mikami Tsugio, ed., Nihon no akebono, (vol. 1 of Zuzetsu Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Shueisha,
I974)> PP- 106-7.
18 Toriyama Kaizuka kenkyu gurupu, ed., Toriyama kaizuka 1980 Nendo chosa gaiho: Jomon
zenki wo shu to sum teishitsuchi iseki no
chosa
gaiho, 2 (Fukui-ken kyoiku iinkai, 1981).
19 Yasuda, "Prehistoric Environment," p. 242.
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THE JOMON PERIOD 65
Preserved remarkably well are ropes, reed baskets, and many
wooden objects, including oars, boards, adzes, bows, and carved
bowls and a comb which are the oldest pieces of lacquer ever found in
Japan. Other innovations were polished stone axes, bone needles, and
thimblelike bone rings. Vertically angled blades were changed to adz-
shaped tools by the use of right-angled tree forks, probably for better
hacking and digging of new forms of vegetation.
20
Torihama is no longer an isolated case. Gourd seeds have also been
found in the Early and Latest Jomon sites of Gifu and Saitama. The
Middle Jomon Idojiri "bread," which has long defied analysis, is now
thought to have contained some eight skins of beans. The Middle
Jomon Tsurune settlement site in Takayama City, Gifu Prefecture,
yielded two carbonized beans
(Leguminosae)
that are reportedly similar
to a cultivated continental Asian bean for which there was nothing
comparable in Japan.
21
The
Middle Jomon
stage
(ca.
3500-2400
B.C.)
The Middle Jomon culture emerged rapidly in the central mountains
of Japan around 3500 B.C., flourished for roughly a thousand years,
and faded almost as rapidly. It was a warm stage with temperatures
that slowly dropped but never declined to today's average.
Explanations for this dramatic florescence of culture include differ-
ent theories: that it was associated with the external introduction of
domesticated root plants, that it was a product of an indigenous devel-
opment of primitive agriculture, that it arose from an exploitation of
rich nut crops on the southern slopes of the Yatsugatake Mountains,
and that it was linked with an escape from the insufferable summer
heat of the lowlands. It is likely that the introduction of yams and taro
(said to have come from south China) and the application of plant
manipulation techniques (including the transplanting of horse chest-
nut seedlings at lower areas) contributed to a population explosion.
22
Yams (yamanoimo:
Dioscorea
japonica) and lily bulbs (ubayuri: Cardio-
crinum cordatum)
were cultivated for their starchy content and pre-
served for winter use. Starch was leached out in springs, and chunks
were steamed on wicker trays in pots to make rolled bread
(koppe-
pan).
Charred bread was unearthed in house no. 4 at Sori and in house
20 Ibid., p. 203.
21 Reported by several participants at the Old Cultural Properties (Kobunkazai) Symposium in
Nagoya (November 1979), sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education.
22 Esaka Teruya, Nihon bunka no kigen (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967), pp. 88-94.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
66 THE EARLIEST SOCIETIES IN JAPAN
no.
9 at Tonai, at the Idojiri sites in Nagano Prefecture.
2
* Horse
chestnuts also produced large quantities of starch with relatively little
effort. The proliferation of adz or axelike tools made of stone unfit for
cutting trees, such as sandstone and slate, is taken as evidence of
spading needed for cultivating starchy roots and bulbs.
The rise of an incipient agriculture would not have required the
introduction of foreign flora. Long residence in an area could have led
to the selection and some manipulation of root plants to improve
yields. Escape from the heat is less facetious than it might at first
appear to be. Resources were plentiful along the coast, but animal life
was more abundant in marginal forest areas. Nagano Prefecture alone
has 2,408 Middle Jomon sites, many at altitudes of between eight
hundred and twelve hundred meters. The average drop in tempera-
ture of one-half degree centigrade for every one hundred-meter in-
crease in elevation would make a difference of four or five degrees
between the mountains and the plain, certainly a difference that added
considerable comfort. Animals avoided the steamy coastal heat, and
people followed. Winters in the mountains were windy and cold, but
seasonal trips to lower ground - made more practical with chunks of
obsidian being used as a medium of exchange - were probably made.
The higher forest line in central Japan was an appropriate area for
all nut crops. Acorns (chiefly Quercus serrata, Q. mongolica, Q. acutis-
sima, and Q. dentata), walnuts (chiefly Juglands sieboldiana), chest-
nuts (Castanea
crenata),
and horse chestnuts or buckeyes
(Aesculus
turbinata)
all were available in the Chubu. Walnuts grew in northern
zones;
they had grown only in south Japan in the cold Earliest Jomon.
Chestnuts thrived in the north and in the Chubu region, and acorns
could be found on the east coast, in the Chubu region, and toward the
southwest.
The sequence of harvests in the overlapping central zone (horse
chestnuts in early September, chestnuts in September to early Octo-
ber, acorns and walnuts in October and November) offered great ad-
vantages. Chestnuts were the most practical. They could be efficiently
stored after they had been heated to kill the vermin, and dried, but
like horse chestnuts, they are far inferior to walnuts and acorns in
caloric value. Walnuts are the most nutritious but the least efficiently
stored. Many species of oaks yield a variety of acorns. Nuts from
evergreen, shiny-leafed oaks (especially
Cyclobalanopsis)
in west Japan
can usually be eaten with little preparation, but those from deciduous
23 Fujimori Eiichi,
Idojiri
(Tokyo:
Chuokoron bijutsu shuppan, 1966), pp. 139-42.
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